"Earlier this week Apple fired Scott Forstall, the architect of its iOS platform, and handed his duties over to the company's chief industrial designer, Jonathan Ive. Ive and Forstall had an infamously chilly working relationship, and one of their biggest disagreements was over the role of so-called 'skeuomorphic' design in Apple's products. Forstall, like his mentor Steve Jobs, favored it; Ive disliked it. To many observers, Forstall's forced exit looks like a vindication of Ive's stance. But if he wants to continue Apple's enviable trend of innovation, he'd be a fool to throw the baby of skeuomorphism out with Forstall's bathwater." Hoped for a thorough article on the benefits of skeuomorphism - got the age-old and intrinsically invalid excuse 'because it sells'. Windows isn't he best desktop operating system because it sells so well. Lady Gaga isn't the best artist because she sells a lot of records. This argument is never valid, has zero value, and adds nothing to what should be an interesting discussion.

Did you sleep through the 1990s? Did you miss the news about mandatory Secure Boot for Windows 8 badging? For over a decade, Windows has been the ONLY CHOICE on most preinstalled computers unless you want to pay four figures for a Mac, or you already know what you're looking for and hit up a niche Linux retailer like System76 or ZaReason. Some company around the turn of the millenium wound up in the absurd situation of installing Win98 and BeOS in a dual boot but not configuring BeOS to fucking BOOT by default because that would have violated their license agreement with Microsoft.

MS certainly played dirty (OTOH I wonder how many companies wouldn't, in such position?) - but even without that, Windows would quite possibly still get the market position it enjoys ...simply because it was the best choice - or rather the least bad out of all more or less meh options, at the time when it really mattered.

When Windows got big, with 3.x & 95, there was hardly any alternative - Macs were too limited and expensive, RISC OS machines similar, Amigas even more limited & from a failing company & their "productive" side never really grabbed people's attention, Atari TOS, GEOS, or GEM even more so, OS/2 too demanding on hardware and with the underlying goal of returning to IBM the control over the PC (so of course the clone makers didn't go along, rebelled Gang of Nine style, chose MS), NeXT self-exiled into the "premium" market & ported too late to PCs, as BeOS will do half a decade later (way too late), Linux in its cradle and DEs for X not yet viable for general consumption.

For better or worse, picking up Windows was sensible - network effects and economies of scale did the rest.
That was the case also in places where people rarely paid for Windows, when they chose to pirate it, when they still choose that... (or grab a MSDNAA license, at best)

Amigas were more poorly marketed than anything else, the hardware was perfectly capable while the OS was in many ways better than anything from MS or Apple. They were also extremely competitively priced, with a usable system being far cheaper than any of the competitors with plenty of scope for upgrades if you wanted.

"Only WinRT devices have mandatory secure boot, any devices based on x86 can be unlocked, and I think the default is unlocked."

Secure boot is mandatory on both x86 and ARM. Devices must be sold with it enabled to secure boot windows, but with x86 MS was compelled to require devices to have a platform specific override mechanism so owners can decide what to boot.

Unfortunately secure boot wasn't really designed to be used by owners or 3rd party platforms, so there is no standardised way to boot alternate operating systems other than disabling secure boot entirely, which is a shameful oversight by the secure boot engineers.

Edit: Was not my intent to drag this thread completely off topic, just wanted to point out that secure boot is enabled by default, it would not make sense to have it disabled from the manufacturer.

Win 8 looks to be a Vista bomb, since they've spent 2 BILLION on ads and sold 4 million copies, that $500 spent for every $40 sale...I'd say Vista and 8 prove you're incorrect.

And as for the "other OSes in the 90s? As someone who was actually in retail then, let me fill you in on a few facts you may or may not have known..

1.- IBM tried to make the PC proprietary when they lost control of the platform by trying to force the MCA bus on us, thank goodness the gang of nine got together and came up with EISA or your desktop would be as proprietary...as well your average laptop or tablet, so naturally NONE of the OEMs was gonna touch an IBM backed OS with a 100 foot pole. Oh and the fact that IBM stuck with the 286 while everyone else went 386 and 486 because they had second source rights to the 286 which Intel wouldn't sell for later chips? Its was DOA, no matter if it was a good OS or not.

2.- BeOS was first designed for an AT&T chip...which flopped, then to the PPC...too high per unit, so by the time they finally got hit with the cluebat that "Hey, there are millions of X86 chips out there, we should make our OS for that!" it was already midway into Win98 so the moment was past, no different than how WordPerfect could have ruled the Office market but they kept putting out badly done DOS ports until VERY late into the 90s.

3.- Finally as for Linux? Sorry but then as now its just too niche, has too many problems, why you can't even get Nvidia Optimus tech working right because the "FOSSie" faction demanded that the DMA be GPL ONLY, thus insuring that Nvidia couldn't hook their driver into...the thing required to make major hardware Nvidia uses work...great job guys..

So I'm sorry but it wasn't required for MSFT to bribe anybody, they had a competition made up of fools. in fact we haven't had ANY real competition to speak of until Apple got Steve Jobs back in the driver seat so he could keep the company from going over the cliff, and last I heard they are making insane amounts of profit. of course they'll never crack above 10% because they don't want to as part of what makes them crazy money is their "product for the rich and elite" branding, no different than how if Air Jordans were $50 a pair they'd have warehouses full of the things, but at $300 a pair they have lines around the block.

Finally as for SecureBoot? That is ONLY locked in WinRT, that's because they don't want people hacking them and putting Android on them because...well it'd look like an even bigger fail, that's why. On the desktop front it helps the BSAA spot the "Win 8 all versions pre-activated" if they ever actually come across a corp using it in the wild (doubtful) but the main reason is the same one that has driven Steve "ZOMG I want an iPad too!" Ballmer for the last 5 years...ripping off Apple. You name it, whatever Apple does MSFT will make a half baked copy. Apple locks their devices so by God MSFT will too, even though all it means is that Woot! will have an even harder time moving them at $99 a pop in 6 months.

Memory sharing in kernel space is a pretty big indicator of a combined work. If they caved on the DMA for nvidia, the GPL would become essentially worthless. They really had no choice but to tell nvidia to fuck off.

So I wonder, maybe the trick to not get down-voted for exposing the ~errors of MS Windows competitors is to... overlook brainfarts of Amiga? ;P ( http://www.osnews.com/thread?540890 ) Or maybe throwing in that MS does half-baked copying of Apple...

WRT Apple & Jobs return: ehh, if only he didn't make the mistake of limiting Nextstep to niche, proprietary hardware - the world of ~computing could look very different now, MS possibly mostly making ~Office & not for their own OS.

Win 8 looks to be a Vista bomb, since they've spent 2 BILLION on ads and sold 4 million copies, that $500 spent for every $40 sale...I'd say Vista and 8 prove you're incorrect.

But come on, I think it's safe to assume we've only seen the beginning of Win8 sales; probably also that this ad budget is meant for some longer campaign.

The "Vista bomb" still shows similar numbers of web users as all OSX combined (so there are probably more Vista users, they should be on average less "web active"), and an order of magnitude more than all Linux combined; is the 3rd most used OS. Such "bomb" wouldn't be bad for MS ...and Win9 (and its Metro 2.x? ...just like Windows got good only at 3.x, and took the world by storm) might yet be loved, just like VistaSE "let's use the marketing trick of 'lucky 7'" is.

BTW SecureBoot and WinRT - I wonder of MS isn't setting things up so that OEMs could seel their devices below cost, subsidised by part of profit from appstore sales going to the maker of the device.
Of course, for that to work, people must be pretty much blocked from replacing OS on their(?) device...

True enough... but I just bought Windows 8 for my not-newly-purchased computer because it IS the best choice for me right now. And I think all the attention Apple has gotten has spurred Microsoft on to actually make some interesting improvements and changes to Windows.

But I sure do miss BeOS, and OS/2... I haven't really enjoyed the latest releases of Mac OS X. I prefer earlier versions. But maybe that is because I really liked NeXT/OpenStep... I don't know.